THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LORD ERROLL:
The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder, by Errol Tyzebinski

The Happy Valley killing of Captain the Hon Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, is one of those mysteries whose fascination never dies. On the surface it was a straightforward murder, a crime of passion. Enroll, a white settler in Kenya, was a woman- iser with an eye for other men's wives. In the pre-war Happy Valley set – sex, drink, drugs – this was tolerated, even admired.

But when Erroll began a torrid affair with Diana, the wife of only two months of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, some were not surprised that, in January 1941, Erroll's body was found in his car, a bullet in his brain. Broughton was naturally the principal suspect and was soon arrested and tried. Even in wartime, public interest was intense – against a background of colonial decadence, the 11th Baronet of Doddington was on trial for his life for the murder of the 22nd Earl of Erroll.

Broughton was acquitted – ballistic evidence showed that the bullet had not come from his revolver. But six months later he killed himself with a morphine overdose in the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. So was he really guilty of murdering Erroll? In White Mischief, the book that drew a new generation to the case, author James Fox had no doubt. But in this exhaustive examination of Erroll's life and times, Errol Trzebinski, who lives in Mombasa, and knows Kenya well, shows that there was more to Erroll than previously believed – he was a hard-working, abstemious settler with the interests of the colony at heart.

In this area, she is convincing. But the core of the book is a new and startling theory – that Erroll was executed by British secret agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The reason? He was a fascist sympathiser, with information that would have endangered the war effort against Germany and ruined the careers of people in high places.

Trzebinski readily admits that she has been able to find no smoking document, no witness, no confession, no concrete evidence of any sort to back up this sensational charge. Instead she has the “Sallyport Papers”. These were compiled by Tony Trafford, a Kenya-born intelligence officer who retired to the Isle of Wight after Kenya became independent. There, he said, he met “Edmund”, a retired naval commander, also born in Kenya, and they became friends. “Gradually their mutual disgust with all the distorting rumours about Lord Erroll began to emerge,” says the author. When Edmund learnt in the late 1980s that he was tenmnally ill, “he determined to place on record his personal knowledge of exactly how the 22nd Earl had died, and he chose Tony Trafford as the repository for this knowledge”.

Trafford wrote it all down (a 25,000-word document) and eventually gave it to the author. Edmund is dead and now Trafford is, too, so neither can answer the many questions it raises. The author has done her best but, since she believes it, when it is contradicted by historical fact she simply skates over the inconsistency or falls back on the excuse that the authorities are covering up.

For example, the Sallyport papers claim that the operation to execute Erroll was run by SOE out of its office in Cairo through an SOE controller in Nairobi. Told by Vera Atkins (secretary to Maurice Buckmaster, a head of SOE) that at no time was Kenya a field of operations for SOE, the author says that the operation to kill Erroll was so secret that maybe other people within SOE did not know about it. Then with diligent research she establishes that there was an organisation called the Combined Services Security Bureau in Nairobi and that if there were a Nairobi SOE controller he would have worked there. But she fails to show that he did.

Next, in common with all theses setting out a conspiracy, the Sallyport papers are overloaded with trivial and insignificant detail so as to give the account a spurious authenticity – the SOE's surveillance team “had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sidecar (SA Army standard issue equipped with a wireless transceiver No. 11 set)”.

But much of the account demands a huge, blind leap of faith. We are expected to believe that the executioner, a woman Erroll knew intimately, hailed his car and asked him for a lift into Nairobi, and he did not recognise her because she had been disguised by a make-up artist from the Nairobi amateur dramatic club.

What dreadful secrets did Erroll know that he had to be silenced? That prominent British politicians thought that the war with Germany was a mistake and wanted an early peace. That the Duke of Windsor had links to the Nazis. But all this was virtually common knowledge in Britain and, anyway, to whom was Erroll going to reveal it? It was no secret to the Germans.

It is true that in the world of secret intelligence strange things sometimes happen, but if Erroll was really killed by any section of British intelligence for the reasons set out in this book, then I will eat this review word by word.

© 2000 Phillip Knightley, for The Sunday Times

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